Bail Money

Bob Costas is unconcerned about the sniping over his comments advocating gun control during halftime of Sunday night’s Eagles-Cowboys game.

The NBC host, spurred by the murder-suicide of Kansas City Chiefs linebacker Jovan Belcher and wife Kasandra Perkins, quoted a column by the sportswriter Jason Whitlock that decried the current “gun culture” in America. Critics were fast to call Costas’ comments uninformed and inappropriate, and as debate raged on Monday, Costas defended his words in an interview with the New York Times.

“I am emphatically not backing off from anything I said,” he told the newspaper. While not advocating for the repeal of the Second Amendment, or the right to have guns under “reasonable circumstances,” Costas said “I think most reasonable people think we do not have sufficient controls on the availability of guns and ammunition.”

Update:

(Washington Examiner) — NBC’s Bob Costas admitted that he made a “mistake” by airing his thoughts on the the Jovan Belcher shooting during a broadcast of Sunday Night Football, though he suggested “the gun lobby” had “orchestrated” some of the backlash.

“What I was trying to say was, that if you want some perspective on this, there are a number of issues related to this that we could begin to talk about and think about,” Costas said on The Dan Patrick Show. “The problem was that I didn’t have enough time to get to many of them” in the short time available during that segment.

“Maybe I gave the audience too much credit, but I said, ‘if you’re looking for perspective, a bit of it can be found’ — and my implication there — with every second counting; I had maybe 50 seconds total for this — my implication was ‘a bit of perspective, here’s one aspect of it,” he also said. “My mistake there was that I left it open to too much misinterpretation.”